Meet Jeff Jahn of DynamiX

Jeff, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.Since my first computer at 3 years old (Macintosh Plus) I’ve always been interested in technology. At 9 my Dad and I built our first computer, and at 14 I started my first “business,” setting up networks and building computers/infrastructure for small businesses.

That only lasted a year, thanks to the embarrassment of having clients call my parents (no cell phones for kids in 1999) to reach me. Once I agreed to come, they then had to pick me up and drive me to their offices.

Fast forward to 2005, and I started my first real company, DynamiX in sophomore year at Berry College. By senior year I was taking 18 hours of classes, working more than full time as sales, design, front-end development and customer support and handling a 2-hour daily commute. On top of that, we had a full-time employee whose salary I had to cover.

Back against the wall, there wasn’t an option other than making it work. Thirteen years later, we are one of, if not the worlds most awarded and recognized website development and software companies, with amazing clients that span across virtually every industry. We consult with major brands and media organizations, and I speak extensively about technology to audiences across the country.

Today, I am focused on our software, Octane and using it to transform the lives of great businesses and franchise organizations at scale.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you? We have had no shortage of struggles to overcome, just as any growing business that is pushing forward will. In college, I averaged between 3 and 4 hours of sleep a night most of senior year, to the point that I nearly dropped out and have very little memory of a lot of those days.

For the first five or six years of running my company, I worked purely to cover the cost of my first employee and keep us going, and had a second job for much of that time to be able to cover my own mortgage. In 2009 we saw our business virtually dry up overnight due to the recession. We used the opportunity to work on evolving our software, at the time called “SE” into something that would really move our space and customers forward.

In 2012, we had a “bet the company” opportunity in working with recent Presidential front-runner Herman Cain, whereby we were asked to develop a new website for him in 21 days, launching on the 4th of July. From design to code to testing and infrastructure with no room for error, this was a do it right or don’t bother coming back to work type of challenge for us all. We worked 7 days a week for 21 days and managed to pull it off without a hitch, and the site went on to handle more than 100 million sessions over its lifetime.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with DynamiX – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others. DynamiX offers transformative websites to great companies, focusing on creating the last website a company will ever need. We do this by marrying deep design aesthetic with psychological principles, integrated into our unique and exclusive software, Octane which we’ve developed to allow our websites to evolve over time.

We don’t try to be an everything to everyone shop and are very careful about the projects that we take on. This has allowed us to work with honest, hungry and like-minded companies who are the best in their respective industries and focus our creative energy on helping to get their message out to their audience.

In the process, our company has become by all accounts we can identify the world’s most awarded business in our industry for the past three years in a row, earning more than 1,000 trophies during this period. The awards are great, but the impact we’ve had on these organizations is what sets us apart from others in the space.

We seek to change the industry approach to website development that sees people “growing to hate their babies” after a few short years. We accomplish this by taking the harder path of crafting software designed to keep our sites above the rest for as long as a client chooses to partner with us, and becoming true partners with our clients in continuing to provide the guidance needed to move them forward over time.

As such, a majority of our clients continue to work with us for years and years, and many have had us develop half a dozen or more websites for their various companies and organizations. We have a few mantras that really help guide the work that we do, including “Do it right or don’t do it,” and “If it’s not maintainable it’s not a solution.”

These two, in particular, ensure that our work always lives up to incredible standards and prevents us from ever being a bottleneck to someone’s success.

So, what’s next? Any big plans? Our big plans involve allowing more great local and national businesses to benefit from our Octane software. We are accomplishing that by creating more approachable options for businesses that may not be at our typical price points, but need to grow and are hungry to do more, as well as by allowing our software to be a wonderful scale-based tool for businesses across the country in non-competitive spaces.